Simulating the season to get to the all-important draft and shape your team for the future can be a bit of a headache. At first it seems like you have to sit through each play - albeit sped up - and click through a bunch of alerts, but thankfully it is possible to turn off simulation intervention and speed through a season at a steady clip. The same draft interactions from Live 07 are possible in this year's game. ESPN delivers a mock draft (as well as pop-up videos that play in the practice arena), you get a solid rundown of your team's needs and improvements that need to made, and you can trade players for draft picks or vice versa. Now if only EA could add in a playable training camp to drill your new recruits, then the off-season mode would be complete.

One oddity that pops up while selecting your team comes in the form of some mislabeled attributes. The attributes are broken up into adequate categories but things just don't shape up like they should. How the Cavs are said to have no athleticism with God's gift to basketball on their team is totally dumbfounding. LeBron is the second coming of Michael Jordan, only younger than his airness was when he got his start, and his team has an empty meter for athleticism.

New Kids On The Block

As with any adequate addition to a yearly sports series, the offering of game modes has been expanded on a bit. NBA Live 08 offers the FIBA World Championship, an eight-team tournament that pits the mighty USA against the rest of the world (even though Team USA doesn't feature Kobe Bryant as it should), there's Quick Pick Play where players can pick any ten players for a one-game experience - think fantasy draft, but only for one game - and there's Scenario Play where you can set several conditions like time left on the clock, quarter, and score and try and claim victory for your favorite team.

None of the new game modes really advance the overall NBA Live experience all that much; the Quick Pick Play, for instance, is held back by the fact that the CPU will pick some of the same players as you for its team. Chances are players will be most interested in a ramification that EA Sports has made to their online leagues. Last year's game confined players to meeting at specific time and playing their game, something that few gamers actually followed through with. Now players can participate in their leagues at any time, at their own pace. The GM of the league can kick players who are stagnant so leagues hopefully won't be bogged down by lazy players.

Moving away from the gameplay aspect of NBA Live 08, and focusing more on the visuals, we can see that the developers at EA's Vancouver studio have once again delivered a solid bit of realism. Players huddling up during a timeout reveals finely detailed models and droplets of sweat that will have you wanting to take a shower in no time. While the animations don't quite match the high level of visual acuity when the game is motionless, they're still better than they have been in the past.

The PS3 version is a little rougher around the edges than its 360 counterpart, showing off some aliasing and a slightly less polished color palette. Not to mention the fact that Sony fans are stuck with 720p as their maximum resolution. The frame rate stays fairly solid throughout gameplay on both systems, only dropping below 60 frames per second during online play, something that happens a bit more in the PS3 version than on Xbox 360. For whatever reason - and this could have been due to other users' connections - we experienced greater lag playing on the Playstation Network than we did playing on Xbox Live.

NBA Live 08

The 2007 game of EA's hoops sim, designed with a new development philosophy that drives gameplay and feature innovation.

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The Verdict

At the end of the day NBA Live 08 is most certainly improved over what we suffered through last season, but that still doesn&#Array;t put it on the same level as other offerings that are out there. The bulk of the basketball still doesn&#Array;t feel natural with canned animations taking the control out of the user&#Array;s hands a bit too often. The game does have its shining moments though, and we&#Array;ll definitely be expecting next year&#Array;s game to return the series to prominence.